Books like

Books like Both Flesh and Not: Essays

12 books with a reading profile close to Both Flesh and Not: Essays by David Foster Wallace. Deep and contemplative; a moderate read.

1

Imaginary Homelands

by Salman Rushdie

Also deep and contemplative · philosophy, academic

Salman Rushdie’s collection of essays centers on the fragmented perspective of the expatriate writer.
2

Crossing the Water

by Sylvia Plath

Also deep and contemplative · academic, literary

Published eight years after her death, this collection gathers transitional poems composed between the publication of The Colossus and the final creative burst of Ariel.
3

Outline

by Rachel Cusk

Also deep and contemplative · philosophy, literary

Faye, a British novelist, travels to Athens during a summer heatwave to teach a week-long creative writing course.
4

Essays of three decades

by Thomas Mann

Also deep and contemplative · philosophy, academic

This collection brings together sixteen of Mann’s non-fiction pieces written between 1911 and 1937, focusing on the intellectual heritage of Europe.
5

100 Selected Poems

by E.E. Cummings

Also deep and contemplative · philosophy, literary

This collection showcases Edward Estlin Cummings’s rejection of standard grammar and punctuation in favor of visual typography.
6

Time Shelter

by Georgi Gospodinov

Also deep and contemplative · philosophy, literary

Gospodinov's novel imagines a Swiss-run clinic that treats Alzheimer's patients by recreating the decade of their youth, with floors that look like the 1960s, 1970s and so on.
7

Invisible Cities

by Italo Calvino

Also deep and contemplative · philosophy, literary

In a garden within the Mongol dynasty, the aging ruler Kublai Khan listens to Marco Polo describe the far-flung outposts of an expanding empire.
8

Exhalation

by Ted Chiang

Also deep and contemplative · philosophy, literary

Exhalation is a collection of nine speculative stories that grapple with entropy, memory, and the mechanics of reality.
9

Orbital

by Samantha Harvey

Also deep and contemplative · philosophy, literary

Set over twenty-four hours aboard the International Space Station, the narrative follows six astronauts—Roman, Pietro, Shaun, Nell, Chie, and Anton—as they complete sixteen orbits around Earth.
10

Weather

by Jenny Offill

Also deep and contemplative · philosophy, literary

Lizzie Benson is a university librarian and former addict who begins answering mail for a climate change podcast hosted by her old mentor.
11

A Room of One’s Own

by Virginia Woolf

Also deep · philosophy, academic

Virginia Woolf bases this extended essay on the material conditions required for women to produce literature.
12

Lincoln in the Bardo

by George Saunders

Also deep and contemplative · philosophy, literary

During the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln visits a Georgetown cemetery to mourn his young son, Willie, who has just died of typhoid fever.

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